Variations
(on Singularization)
. . . so perhaps, then, at last again, they can return, and return again in and as their own repetition, a repetition that displaces, metamorphoses what it repeats, singularizes it. The invariant without which variation barely makes any sense is always-already caught in the very process of variation itself: everything flows, everything flees, everything leaks, everything slips and runs off as the language of fiction spins its own strands, its own threads, its own lines, like an old crone forever entrapping a Prince(-Maybe-)Charming and his Sleeping(-Aging-)Beauty in her perpetual reenactments of a story which, though long told, may still be a story without an ending: the dreams and beauty sleep of the one are protracted, the better to feed the other’s ambitions and relaunch a quest that, come what may, remains intransitive, reflected as it is in the mirror of the other’s—the same, though different. This quest, handed down to each character from time immemorial, is reenacted from text to text, started anew as each story and each participant are constantly reinvented along new, varied lines; eventually, putting a term to such a quest matters very little: each stop in the process is but temporary, vibrant with still other possibilities. On the other side of a novel lies the void, perhaps, lies silence of sorts—but even silence is a word which, as such, propels the texts onwards, perpetuates the writing’s motion. You move along those lines that intertwine within each text and connect the texts together, before unknotting and wearing out thinner and thinner, yet you desperately hang on to such lines, though erased as soon as drawn, as they threaten at any time to snap and let you down—so even more desperately, you look for other ramifications in the texts, hoping this time they will be more reliable; just in case, you try a makeshift knot or two of your own, patching bits and pieces of text together, only to realize that the hermeneutic Voice of a text like Hair O’ the Chine sounds eerily like yours, that the meaning you are after slips from your grasp all too easily, that no matter how sophisticated your analysis may appear at first, how tight-or large-focused your interpretive lens might be, what patience you might elicit when trying to immobilize the tableau offering itself to your understanding, no matter all that, you can in the end never claim discursive closure of any sort. Everywhere in the texts those elusive characters whose textual identities seem to be reinvented in the course of each new sentence, keep reflecting your own grotesque, distorted image, sending you back to fantasies and desires you barely dare to admit might be yours, to obsessions, yours again, ever more comical and absurd when face to faceless with a textual universe that is determined to hush the few, if any, secrets it still possesses. For if everything has already been told before, has been for ages, not to say for ever, you just cannot help postulating some secret somewhere to penetrate, suspecting the existence of some key to make sense of the mystery; and those who, like the Rosenbergs in The Public Burning or Tiger Miller in The Origin of the Brunists, dare to think otherwise and claim for everyone to hear that no, damn it, there is no secret, end up traitors to the State, to History, to God, to Truth and Meaning; they are turned into scapegoats to be expelled from the grand narrative they are perforating holes into to prevent its signification from collapsing. Such scapegoats are in fine but lines of flight that the signifying regime cannot tolerate; your choice, as one of the regime’s watchdogs, will eventually be between a goat’s ass and the face of the god, between sorcerers and priests. The complete system you once defended thus consists of the paranoid face or body of the despot-god (whose name can be Domiron in The Origin of the Brunists or Uncle Sam in The Public Burning) in the signifying center of the temple; the interpreting priests (Eleanor Norton and a bunch of others, duplicating Richard Nixon’s performance) who continually recharge the signified in the temple (Giovanni Bruno’s bedroom as the private replica of the ritual center of the Western World, the most paradoxical place in all America, and thus the holiest: Times Square) transforming it into a signifier; the hysterical crowd of people outside, whether gathered on a hilltop in the vicinity of a coalmine in West Condon, or clumped in tight circles or circus rings in Times Square, who jump, jumping themselves, from one circle to another; and the faceless, depressive scapegoat emanating from the center, chosen, treated, and adorned by the priests, cutting across the circles in its headlong flight into the desert—and what ultimate difference is there between the Rosenbergs and Richard Nixon, Giovanni Bruno and Tiger Miller, Jesus and Judas (“Which . . . one of us,” Jesus gasped, “is really He: I or . . . or thou?”)? For all such arborescent, hierarchical, centered groups, are eventually subjected to and challenged by the writing’s variational force which short-circuits this dreary world of the signifier and its profound antics. Nixon, who has had so much trouble choosing between Ethel’s, i.e., the (scape)goat’s ass, and the face of the god revealed to him under Uncle Sam’s traits, will have in turn to bare his own ass to enter, in a last pratfall, chosen, treated and ador(n)ed by Uncle Sam—“you’re my everything, sunshine—you’re my boy!”—his own becoming-animal (“Rrowf! Snort! Grr-roww-ff!”): the signifying system has been disrupted, positions inverted as the goat’s ass is now Nixon’s, on display for the forceful interp[r]e(ne)t(r)ation of the priest you seem to have been, outcast, cast as. Turned into a new sacrificial victim, Nixon is thus expelled from the text to make a leap—“you been ee-LECK-ted!”—of more than twenty years into the American real: the boundaries between fiction and reality, literature and politics, collapse, and you suddenly realize that you are not safely hidden, as you once thought you were, behind the book’s protective cover. Textual boundaries subside as the writing perniciously works against what it fundamentally rests upon, leaving behind but few ephemeral remnants that need to be traced and retraced from within the text that has enmeshed you; yet each new retracing, each new beginning can and will never provide grounds solid enough to build meaning upon. You reread again, start over again, turn on your heels, and cover the length of a textual loop that uncoils and recoils indefinitely (John’s Wife) over no ground, around no substance but that of its own language, as though language had lost its referents and were only good for the noise it made. Words become toys again you, a child again, are now free to play with, experiencing, experimenting them for the first time, or so it seems. Words only refer to more words, signs to more signs as they endlessly get remobilized, reflected in the mirror of all others; distances are abolished and in the course of what appears to be merely tautological you feel the real on the tip of your tongue even as it eludes your grasp; rehashed and rehearsed, from simulacrum to simulacrum, the real is wearing out, yet for that matter appears in all its singularity. So you give it one more read, feeling that you still do not know how to read the texts, intuiting in the meantime that, somehow, if they often read like the others, it may be because you take in similarity first, difference only later: each in its own way, always the same, always different, the texts celebrate their singularity and challenge you not to reduplicate them—i.e., what they are—in the mirror of your critical activity, but rather to prolong, beyond the frame, their variational impetus, bound as you are to the eternal reenactment of what, other than, they can still be. In the end, then, you never read the text and never can; what you permanently reread instead is a text, once, and as you reread it, awakening its possibilities in the acknowledgement of its limitations, you elevate this one singular time to its infinite variety, you redefine time as it passes on, passing the texts on, and turn it into a single “now” that both sums up and drafts all of its past and future variations in perpetual reenactments whose function is to keep the singularizing process open . . .
